Week 9 Day 1: Joker and the Cybermen

This idea of an Underground Man really intrigues me.  I can't think of someone who does something without rationally considering his options and choosing what is most advantageous to him.  And if they do choose something disadvantageous to themselves while still retaining enough reason to understand that what they are choosing is wrong and that they do not want to choose to do it, I would call them insane!  However, the fact that they realize they are wrong makes them not insane by definition!  So I really am at a loss for an example of this Underground Man as someone in real life.  Perhaps the only example that could even come close is the Joker from the Batman: The Dark Knight.  That version of the Joker, more than others, really had no reason for doing what he did.  He wasn't in it for money, he wasn't in it for pleasure, he wasn't in it for domination like the Scarecrow.  Though some might say he had a sick kind of pleasure in his terrorist activities, I might go against that by saying that during the scene where Batman is coming at him on his Speeder bike and the Joker is standing there, telling Batman to run him over, there is a moment where you can see that the Joker does not care that he is going to die.  He has an internal instinct to not want to die, and yet he seems to ignore that and goads Batman to kill him.  For what purpose we don't know.  He seems unfazed when Batman fails to kill him, and we know if he wanted to die he could easily kill himself.  So for some reason, he seems to want that which goes against his own self judgement and does not care that it is the wrong thing to do.

Another thing I wanted to talk about is the idea of losing emotions, and giving up emotions entirely.  Some people said during class that acting on emotions was the wrong way to go through life, and that getting rid of those things, along with other faults, and relying solely on reason, was the way to live a productive life.  To me, being a Doctor Who fan, this reminds me of an enemy of the Doctor called the Cybermen.  The idea of the Cybermen is that one man, John Lumic, wanted to cheat death.  He was a genius who was dying of sickness and old age, and to cure both of those he built himself a cybernetic suit of armor.  This would house his brain, keeping him alive.  But, he also believed, like some of the people in class, that emotions were obsolete, and would only hold him back.  So, to counteract this, he built into the suit an Emotional Inhibitor, which would allow him to keep back his pesky emotions.  He considered this achievement the next step in human evolution, and wanted the rest of the world to convert with him.  However, not everyone wanted to become a walking brain in a suit of armor, and resisted.  This is where my point comes in.  Why would people want to refuse?  Because they see their "faults" as strengths, the things that make them human.  Getting rid of those attributes would be getting rid of who they are.  So sometimes, emotions are just as useful as reason, if not moreso.